Round 2 of insomnia + wine this week... I've been trying to figure out the source of my recent angst, and I have yet another theory, yet another "main thing that is consuming my thoughts." For the past year, life has been about transition. When one is transitioning, it is virtually impossible for her life to be about anything but transition. It's about going to therapy appointments, writing and re-writing coming-out letters, visualizing, going to electrolysis appointments, laser appointments, doing voice exercises, writing blog entry after blog entry about my metamorphosis, getting a new wardrobe, going on PE and chatting or reading threads, researching surgeons, attending support group meetings, learning how to live the way I've always wanted to live.

At some point, probably sooner than I thought it might be, the physical transition will be over, and a good deal of the mental transition will have taken place. In under a year, I will have had surgery. There will be no more hairs left on my face to zap. I won't have to go to therapy to fulfill the SOC. My voice will sound the way I want it to. My body will be as it was supposed to be. I won't need to go to a support group. I'm in this protective cocoon right now, as I expressed to a friend, where I can make excuses for not completely living because "I am in the midst of all this." For example, dating. I have released myself from the pressures of dating until this is "over," whatever that means. There are other pressures that I have released for now, while I cope with transition.

When all this is over, then what? Then I just need to live. Which ought to be very appealing, but the thing is, I don't know how to just live. To just be. To just be content. Because in 39 years, I never have been. What does one do when she is content? What motivates and inspires her? What is her point? Concerning dating, how the heck do I date people as a woman? I guess it will come naturally. Everything else has.

I keep thinking about this character from The Shawshank Redemption. Brooks was a convict who had spent almost all of his life in Shawshank Prison. When he was released, he had no idea how to cope with life on the outside; he couldn't handle it. He ended up hanging himself; he carved "Brooks was here" above his noose. He had become institutionalized. I feel at times as if I have been in prison for my whole life, that I have become institutionalized. Will I know how to handle life on the outside? I hope so. When my time at Shawshank is up, I think that I will do a better job of handling it than Brooks. It's a little intimidating at times, though. I won't carve my name anywhere unless my boyfriend/girlfriend/partner/husband/wife carves his or hers as well, on some picnic table somewhere, where we can come back 10 years later and find it.

The prospect of post-transition life, while exciting and what I want, is also somewhat scary. What I try to fall back on, and what I am trying to fall back on now and tell myself, is that so far, this has come naturally for me. Things I feared, I did not need to fear. Pieces of me that I thought I'd need to really work at, required no work at all. They were always within me; they just needed to be released from the institution.

Perhaps you and I can meet down in Ziuatanejo...they say the Pacific has no memory.

I know how you feel. So much of my life right now is involved in this process and, sure, I am preparing for an eventual end, but I have no idea what that will be like except at some point life will just be about life once again.

It's striking to me that most of my life I've had this kind of "parallel" view, always imagining what each phase of my life would be like had I been born in the right sex. Now that I have the chance, it seems to feel pretty natural to slide right into that imagined life... it's easy as long as I quite worrying about it so much and simply get to living it. :-)

I've always imagined you more like the Tim Robbins character. Riding in a convertible along the ocean in Mexico. Wind blowing through your hair.

Being on PE, I only know of you electronically-speaking, but I think from reading of your life that you are strong enough to make the adjustment. And thrive. And you will do that because you look a while before you leap. I hope that I will consider this just as you have done all along.